Harmonix has developed many games about recreating and performing music. This time around, the Guitar Hero and Dance Central studio wants players to get creative. Fuser is all about creating mashup remixes out of popular songs, either in a campaign, freestyle mode or multiplayer.
After preview events earlier this year, this is the first extended hands-on with Fuser, giving me a full four days with 31 songs, two campaign missions and the freestyle mode.
Fuser Gameplay – 13-Minutes of Mixing in Harmonix’s Music Game Watch on YouTube
You manage four channels – each song is divided into drums, a bassline, and a melody instrument such as synths or strings and vocals. Each of these categories is mapped to a fixed button, so you always press the right-hand button for the vocal track, the left hand one for drums and so on. As intuitive as the controls are, Fuser is immediately a lot. Unlike previous Harmonix games, which have you focus on your instrument by relegating the crowd and your avatar to the background, there’s a whole music festival virtually standing between you and your table. Initially, I had a good giggle at the idea that attendees at a huge festival like that would dare to shout “I want country!”, but it’s just one of the ways in which gameplay doesn’t really fit the rest of Fuser’s ideas. The skill it asks of you lies in dividing your attention between crowd requests, in-game tasks and, oh yeah – making actual music.Fuser is such a departure for Harmonix not only because it ditches the dexterity challenge of classic rhythm gaming, but because the developer is actively trying to reach players who either aren’t interested in music gaming as a test of skill, or are unable or unwilling to invest in peripherals by basing everything around your controller only.
“With how things have developed, Fuser is coming at the right time,” marketing director Dan Walsh tells me, referring to how the coronavirus crisis has made it more difficult for peripherals to be produced and shipped. “But the overall accessibility was our main concern from the beginning. Fuser works the same no matter what platform or controller you play with, and there is no wrong way to play it.”
Walsh also mentions Fantasia: Music Evolved and DropMix, the latter of which is probably the closest to Fuser but struggled due to the large board it required and its prohibitively high price at launch. “DropMix used the mechanics of a board game, and asked players to make strategic decisions that weren’t about the music, first and foremost,” Walsh says. “With DropMix and Fantasia, we went into the direction of introducing more player agency, something Guitar Hero for example didn’t have. With a game like Guitar Hero, your experience with a song and my experience are going to be indistinguishable, we both reach a five star rating the same way. In Fuser, skill has a completely different meaning.”
Product director Daniel Sussman adds: “We’re never gonna tell you your mix is bad. Taste is subjective. We’re asking you to put yourself out there and we’re not gonna punish you for that.”
There are few categories you’re actually scored on, and you can’t lose points, but I soon discover that what brings you points isn’t necessarily musically interesting. This regularly put my instincts as a musician and a player at odds with each other. Let’s say you’ve just found a mix of tracks you want to keep going for a bit, only to be interrupted by a request. Whatever the digital festival-goer shouts at you might go terribly with your current mix, so you likely won’t change just one thing, but everything. Sure, it keeps you on your feet, but it gives you very little time to just enjoy the music for a bit or wait until the song has reached a good point for a break. You have the option to ignore the request, but fulfilling requests and quickly changing anything on the fly is ultimately where the points come from. There’s also an overall crowd appreciation meter that’s likely driven by the software interpreting how well your chosen tracks go together. To satisfy Fuser’s requirements as a game, I sometimes ended up building mixes I personally didn’t like, even though most tasks are open to your interpretation, like “play a song from the 2010s” or “only use three discs”.